Your shop window - make your website work harder.

The first thing to understand is this: Having a great website is absolutely pointless if nobody ever sees it. You may as well be setting up a shop in the middle of a desert – no matter what you are selling & at what price, you will never get many visitors! The whole point of web-marketing is to drive large volumes of traffic through your website, i.e. taking your shop out of the desert & putting it right in the middle of Oxford Street! The more traffic you can get through your site, the greater the chances of the site helping to increase your business levels.

The above example is slightly flawed however, as just getting a lot of visitors to a site does not necessarily mean any of those visits will result in an enquiry/lead/sale. To use the shop example, putting a diving equipment shop on Oxford Street would certainly mean a lot more people saw your offering, but it would probably equate to very few extra sales.

The key to generating business from a website is by driving targeted traffic through the site. By targeted, I mean users who have a high likelihood of being interested in what you are offering.

Search engines such as Google, MSN & Yahoo have enabled website owners to drive highly targeted traffic to their websites. By ensuring your diving equipment website appears at or near the top of search engine rankings when someone types the words "Diving" & "Equipment" into their search box, you guarantee that any visitors to your site already have an interest in your product. This is the reason web-based retailers put so much effort into making sure they rank highly for their product "Key Terms". So typing "Insurance" into Google, brings up Direct Line & Money Supermarket etc & typing in "Holidays" brings up Thompson etc.

So what does this mean for brokers looking to increase targeted traffic through their websites? Well, the fact that "Mortgage" is a desirable "Key Term" for anyone looking for mortgage advice means you have to be a little more specific. For example, if I type "Mortgage" into Google, the top of the results list is populated by large entities that have a lot of money to divert into ensuring they appear high up this list. But what if I am a little more specific & type in "Mortgage Advice Leicester" or "Mortgage Broker Birmingham"?

All of a sudden, the results are much less corporate. And here is where a small business can take huge advantage of search engine marketing. Around 70% of people research purchases on the internet today. Why? – Because search engines make it so easy to get the information you want within seconds. For this reason, most people tend to make their searching a little more specific these days, and this is where small businesses can capitalise on "local search". People search for "Hotels in Brighton" or "Dentist in Hampstead" – when the product or service involves a personal event, this kind of searching is standard.

You are probably getting my drift now – if a broker can ensure he/she is featured near the top of the rankings for a number of probable "Key Term" combinations for his/her geographical area, then a good level of highly targeted traffic can be expected. Having worked with a number of companies on web-marketing campaigns over the last few years, I believe it is one of the most efficient methods of marketing possible, and enables real, measurable results.

Lastly, and most importantly, how do you get to the top of these search engine rankings for your chosen "Key Terms"? Well, there are two ways.

One is termed "Natural SEO (search engine optimisation), whereby you ensure that your site is well populated with the relevant "Key Terms" and is built in a way that ensures the search engines "see" the content very easily. (This is not too complex, but is another article in itself, so I’ll save this for another update)

The other is known as "Pay-Per-Click" (PPC) marketing, whereby a certain budget is put aside in order to ‘bid’ on a certain "Key Term/s".

If you wanted to use PPC, to appear high in the search engine rankings for the term "Mortgage", you would be paying large amounts of money every time someone clicked on the link to your website (hence pay-per-click). This is due to the fact that it is a very competitive "key term". What is less expensive however is bidding on a "key term" that is less competitive, i.e. "Mortgage Advice Oxford".

The good news is that there are a number of companies who take the hassle out of doing this for you. If you decide on a budget of £100 per month for example, the companies can help decide which key terms would bring in the most traffic & they will set the system up for you. If done right, this should bring a good amount of highly targeted traffic to your website. This should in turn bring in a lot of enquiries and leads, for which you will not have to pay, and PPC marketing can be done with no need for contracts or commitments, so it’s very easy to give it a try for a couple of months.

So that is PPC marketing. If you have a good website which gives helpful information to prospects, PPC is worth a go. No other form of marketing puts you in front of someone who is, at that precise moment, searching for your product.